George Billis Gallery Los Angeles is pleased to announce the gallery’s fifth solo show of Carol Inez Charney’s work. The exhibition of her new series “After Painting” will open with an artist reception on March 4th from 5-8 pm and run through April 1st, 2017.​

“After Painting” re-examines iconic work by famous artists in order to see these ubiquitous images in a new light. Charney continues to use natural distortions present in our every day world – namely, moisture and ice crystals — to create painterly abstractions on these images.

“In her latest body of work, After Painting, from 2016, Charney focuses completely on culture, i.e., universally beloved paintings by Leonardo, Van Eyck, Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Chagall and Picasso, all made before 1923, and now in the public domain. Using high-quality reproductions, Charney rephotographs details from the works and groups them in twos and threes—into diptychs or triptychs, to employ the art-historical term used for multi-panel paintings. The ‘After’ designation refers to the art-historian’s way of labeling copies of old artworks made by admiring younger artists, a common practice before the advent of photography, and a way of paying homage to and learning from the past: Van Gogh copied Rubens, and Rubens copied Leonardo, and so on. Sometimes this hands-on method of assimilation resulted in creative variations, like Picasso’s innumerable Velasquez variations, or Manet’s quotations (or parodies) of Giorgione and Titian.

“With degrees in both painting and photography, Charney is an admitted “frustrated painter” who found photography more congenial than painting, but still seeks the complex ‘conversation,’ or moment’ provided by the slower, handmade medium. In Charney’s carefully assembled diptychs and triptychs, we see iconic modernist paintings anew, through the artist’s curtain of rivulets, enriched by water’s metaphorical associations with time, change, metamorphosis and the unconscious. A century ago, Marcel Duchamp mocked what he considered at the time the connoisseur’s fetishistic interest in the painter’s hand and touch; Charney’s photographic studies, which “reinterpret classical painting,” let us revel in that handiwork, made invisible to us through familiarity, perhaps, through her sharp eye and lens.” —DeWitt Cheng​Carol Inez Charney received her BA in painting from the University of Santa Cruz and her MFA in photography from San Jose State University and has exhibited extensively on the West Coast and in New York. She currently lives and works in San Francisco.

George Billis Gallery opened its second location in the Culver City area of Los Angeles in 2004 and marks its 15th year in the Chelsea arts district in New York City. George Billis shows work by both emerging and established artists. For more information please contact the gallery at: